War movies often include a scene where a group of soldiers make a heroic charge. In some cases, everyone dies in a valiant massacre; other times it’s a combination of some troopers falling from random gunfire and their comrades making it to the objective to win the day. But most war games want you to always feel like the hero, the single soldier who turned the tide and won the battle, and these games empower you to do so.

MAG doesn’t do anything to make you feel like a super-soldier; here, you’re part of a grander unit, a small cog in a machine that can afford to lose the occasional part… and you’d better not forget it. Fighting battles on a scale of anywhere between 64 to 256 players means that victory’s not about the individual, but how the army functions as a whole. When a good command structure is in place, and you’re playing with a team that generally looks out for one another, then MAG is a great alternative for those burnt out on Modern Warfare 2’s brand of soldering. But when things fall apart, MAG becomes a chaotic frag-fest — a large scale team deathmatch where soldiers are dying en masse, and anyone alive on the losing side is simply trying to score a few points to hopefully level up before the end.

Thankfully, most battles are decently organized, and players usually strive to work together in order to complete the objectives at hand. This level of cooperation would be pretty amazing if it occurred simply because players cared about one another, but I know the truth: They’re in it for the experience. Developer Zipper Interactive has brilliantly given squad commanders — a leadership role available per-match to any player level 15 or higher — the ability to assign goals for their units, which not only focuses their team without so much as a spoken word, but also encourages them to listen by awarding them extra experience for doing so. Sure, sometimes I have to deal with a commander who issues objectives in a severely sub-optimal sequence, but the good squad commanders make MAG a multiplayer shooter unlike any other. When they fail… well, the match turns into an annoying let’s-make-the-best-of-it sort of situation.

Players who are in it for the long haul have plenty of reason to listen to squad commanders, though, as extra experience is extremely valuable. After all, before you can participate in 256-player matches, you have to level up. More importantly — much like a massively multiplayer game — MAG forces you to choose one of three factions, each with distinct talent trees to spend points in as you climb the levels. While you have the option to create several equipment loadouts for various battle situations (focusing on things like support, heavy weapons, etc.), the talent trees determine your battlefield specialization.

I, for instance, am a combat medic, focusing my talents on skills that allow me to bring back the fallen and provide support with assault rifles. And unlike, say, Call of Duty, the only way to unlock certain additional weapons or add-ons is through talent points, meaning that you’ll likely stare down the barrel of the same gun for many, many hours. That probably sounds like a huge turn-off for a generation of players who are used to being rewarded every few seconds for so much as farting while playing, but it’s one of the things I really enjoy about MAG. Every skill point earned — and the subsequent acquisition of new gear — is significant, and makes leveling up much more rewarding than in any other shooter.

What I don’t enjoy about MAG’s character grind is that you can only have a single character per PlayStation Network account. With three separate factions to play, this means that I’m stuck leveling one character and only playing with friends who’ve picked the same faction as me (I’m Raven, if you must know). I’m told that you can create another character once you reach the 60-level cap, but that’s so far off at this point that it just annoys me that I have to earn extra character slots. And while I can appreciate the way that this makes players take pride in their faction and care about how they’re affecting the overall war online, it feels arbitrary, since I can just go through the tedious process of creating more PSN accounts.

This isn’t a game for those who want to be an army of one. MAG, much like actual war, is often an ugly, confusing mess that tosses a group of people into extraordinary situations where they can overcome through teamwork or die as frustrated individuals. If you’re looking for just another game to see your name on top of a leaderboard then keep on walking. We’re not looking for heroes here in Raven, maggot, but we sure could use a few replacement cogs for our war machine.